When it came to monitoring her impressionable youngster's media habits, my friend Holly was in way over her head.
“My 9-year old son, Rylan, had a bunch of friends over, and they wanted to watch the movie ‘The Terminator,’” she told me. “I said, ‘You are not watching that movie! It's rated R and it's too violent.’ And they all looked at me and said, ‘We've already seen it.’”
My friend literally threw up her hands. “They had all seen it already at another friend’s house, every single one of them, including my son. My girlfriend has a similar story about catching her son zooming to the Bada Bing strip club scenes on ‘The Sopranos’ DVD. You can't contain anything.”
My heart goes out to Holly and modern parents everywhere. How do you protect your kids’ innocence when Internet shockers like “Two Girls, One Cup” are just a mouse click away? But my heart also goes out to Rylan and his peers. I hate to sound like a grumpy, middle-aged man here, but I will anyway.
That’s because when it comes to taboo TV, kids today have it too easy, with DVDs and video iPods and YouTube and other options. But by not missing out on anything, Rylan and kids everywhere are totally missing out.
Plan and scheme
When I was a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, you really had to work to see stuff on TV that you weren't supposed to see. You had to plan and scheme and connive and possibly hold a ball of aluminum foil in your hand to get a clear signal. It was a quest, a noble and important quest, and that's what made it so fun.
“Because my family was deeply religious, I was forbidden to watch any show about vampires or ghosts since such things were of the devil,” David recalls. “Fortunately, I had a young, hip aunt who lived two blocks from my school. Running at top speed I could usually make it to her apartment by 3:13 and she would tell me everything that had happened during the first 12 minutes. The reception was sometimes fuzzy and I would have to hold one of the aerials in my hand while watching but it didn't matter. I would have sat in a pile of broken glass to watch that show.”
The hot-button show in my household in the ’70s was “Saturday Night Live,” but my mom put the kibosh on it because of a sketch involving the actress Claudine Longet. Longet, it seems, had recently shot her skier boyfriend and claimed it was an accident, and the “SNL” sketch showed random skiers getting shot at the “Claudine Longet Ski Invitational.” I knew nothing about this news story at the time, but I do know that my mom didn't think skiers getting shot was funny at all, so the show was banned.
How did I cope with no “SNL” when my friends at school were all abuzz about it? I bought a book of “Saturday Night Live” sketches and made do with that. Did the HBO-deprived kids of the early ’00's go out and get Candace Bushnell's “Sex and the City” book? I doubt it. They had DVDs and rebroadcasts.
Ball of foil and cable porn
Two friends of mine, both named Jack, were cable porn pioneers, and I'm inspired by their courage and commitment. “Back in early days of cable, we used to get this soft-core channel at 3 in the morning,” recalls Jack M. “It was all static and blurry but if I held a massive ball of aluminum foil in one hand and the antenna in the other, I could occasionally make out a boob or a butt. I'd watch ’til the sun came up.”
Jack P.’s newfangled cable system was static-free, but not bug-free. “You could watch one minute of the dirty movie channel before it would show up on your bill,” he explains. “So everyday my siblings and I would watch one minute. The problem was sometimes you’d watch a minute not knowing that another kid had already watched a minute and then we'd get totally busted.”
Others kids sacrificed part of the viewing experience just to watch part of a forbidden TV show.
Steve didn't get see a single episode of the long-running ’70s classic “Three's Company” until he was well into adulthood. “We weren't allowed to watch it because my older brother had recently come out as gay and the Jack Tripper-playing-gay thing was upsetting to my mother,” he explains.
At a restaurant one night, “there were two TVs on playing ‘Laverne & Shirley’ with the sound turned down. My heart started pounding because I knew that ‘Three’s Company’ was coming on next so I did everything I could to stall for time. I took really small bites of my hamburger. I pretended to have a stomachache — just so I could catch a glimpse of ‘Three’s Company.’ I was, like, salivating. And just as the opening credits rolled, my parents made us leave. In retrospect, maybe I should have pretended to faint.”
Just the sound will do
Where Steve was willing to do without sound, my friend Scott was happy to do without a picture, the taboo TV equivalent of our grandparents telling us they walked 10 miles in the snow with no shoes to get to school.
“I would use my little Sears cassette recorder to capture the audio of shows that were on past my bedtime,” he confesses. “I would go to bed as planned, then sneak into the family room, drape a blanket over the television to hide the light, turn the volume down to a pre-arranged level, and position my recorder next to the speaker, dash back to bed, then listen back to the cassettes the next day.” What would he record? Boobs? Butts? “Three's Company”? “Nah, it was like ‘Baryshnikov on Broadway’ or ‘Night of 100 Stars,’ ” he says sheepishly. “Some glamorous musical extravaganza.”
Do kids today do that with “Dance War: Bruno vs. Carrie-Anne”? No way, Jose. They're too busy texting and MySpacing and Facebooking each other.
And that’s a crying shame.
My “Terminator” friend Holly's dad refused to let her watch the one movie I ever remember my parents taking me to in the theater, “The Sound of Music.”
“I was reading the TV Guide one day and I said, ‘Look, Dad, “The Sound of Music” is on tonight!’” Holly remembers. “He promptly responded, ‘Hell, we've seen her come over that hill a thousand times!’ So I was not allowed to watch — and have yet to see — that great American classic. The irony is that this was the same man who took me to see ‘The Godfather’ when I was seven. I've had nightmares about horse’s heads in beds ever since.”
Kids today should be so lucky.
Dennis Hensley (www.dennishensley.com) is the author of “Screening Party” and “Misadventures in the (213)” and is a co-host of the radio show Twist.